Biosemiotic criticism: modelling the environment in literature

Abstract

This article elaborates a synthesis of the semiotics of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School, literary semiotics, ecocriticism and biosemiotics as a methodology for analysing nature writing. The methodology uses the concept of modelling as it was developed by Yuri Lotman and Thomas A. Sebeok. From this perspective, every piece of nature writing is essentially a model of the relationship between humans and nature, in its actual state as well as in its idealised form. The methodology distinguishes three levels of modelling: zoosemiotic modelling, linguistic modelling and artistic modelling. As a practical example, the author analyses Fred Jüssi’s nature essay Ohakas [The Thistle] (1976). The analysis demonstrates that the different modelling levels in the text are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary of one another. This also means that there is no need to oppose literature’s ability to represent nature and the complexity of its poetic structure.

Keywords:

• biosemiotics
• biosemiotic criticism
• literary semiotics
• Tartu–Moscow semiotic school
• modelling systems
• Estonian nature writing

Acknowledgements

A longer version originally published in Estonian as: Maran, Timo. 2013. Biosemiootiline kriitika: keskkonna modelleerimine kirjanduses. Akadeemia 25 (5): 824–847. Translated by Ain Rada and Meelis Leesik. Published with permissions. The author expresses his gratitude to Peeter Torop, Silvi Salupere, Elin Sütiste, Kadri Tüür and Margit Maran for the references and recommendations that they contributed. The research for this article was supported by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence for Cultural Theory), also under institutional research grant IUT02-44 from the Estonian Research Council, under grant 7790 of the Estonian Science Fund and under project contract EMP151 by the Norway Financial Mechanism 2009–2014.

Notes

1. Such a relationship between a literary work and meaningful structures external to it is probably broadly operative in and characteristic of a variety of genres. With regard to fiction, the Danish literary semiotician Jørgen Dines Johansen (2002, 164) writes: ‘[w]e match the information offered by the text with our general understanding of our own world, and so we supplement the missing information from our general understanding of the functioning of the world. We do not compare fictional thoughts and feelings, or a fictional plot, to what is going on in the world; rather, we compare these elements to our interpretation of the forces, desires, and reasons, governing man and his relations to his lifeworld.’ The introduction of the separate concept of nature-text is justified because, in the case of nature writing, the relations between the literary work and meaningful structures outside the work are concrete and intense and have significant impact on the interpretation of the work.

2. At the same time, focusing on the structure of poetic text does not mean that Yuri Lotman should be regarded as a structuralist literary scholar. Yuri Lotman’s views of the relations between text and context, text and code transcend the limits of structuralism, and his reception in the West has been non-structuralist from the very first translations of Yuri Lotman’s work (Torop 1999).

3. Depending on the perspective, the contents of the table can be arranged in two different ways. The actual arrangement emphasises the direction of semiotic causality: the primacy of the environment and its ability to filter semantic relations at the level of perception of the environment and of literary text. If the order of the table were reversed, starting from the ‘presentation of artistic modelling’ (now in the lower right corner), this would emphasise the process of interpretation and analysis of literary text, since in such texts the level of artistic modelling is accessed first, while the other levels are mediated to a lesser or greater extent and need to be elucidated separately.

4. The possibly hierarchic relationship between zoosemiotic and linguistic modelling constitutes a challenging topic. Thomas A. Sebeok attributes the function of primary modelling system to zoosemiotic modelling and the function of secondary modelling system to linguistic modelling (Sebeok 1991). Yuri Lotman has written about two parallel primary modelling systems: in addition to language, Yuri Lotman also recognises the existence of structured space, by which he primarily means phenomena which transcend the homomorphic structure of space (e.g., shadows, reflections on water, echoes) (Y. Lotman 1992). To bypass the contradiction between the terms used by Sebeok and Yuri Lotman, I will use zoosemiotic, linguistic and artistic modelling as my principal terms.

5. Translation by K. Mits, published in 2003 in ISLE 10 (2): 213–214.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timo Maran

Timo Maran is a senior research fellow at the Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia. His research interests include theory and history of zoosemiotics; ecocriticism, Estonian nature writing and semiotic relations of nature and culture; and theory and semiotics of biological mimicry. His publications include Mimikri semiootika [Semiotics of mimicry] (2008), Readings in Zoosemiotics (ed., with D. Martinelli and A. Turovski, 2011), Semiotics in the Wild. Essays in Honour of Kalevi Kull on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday (ed., with K. Lindström, R. Magnus and M. Toennessen 2012).